Nom Power!

Sweet and Sour Pork Recipe

by

Chia Hsin Wee

-

24 August, 2014

I bet this is one of the most chosen dishes for generally everyone from Chinese Restaurants. I used to avoid cooking this dish, thinking that the number of ingredients for the sauce can cause quite a hassle to cook. After one fateful day when Stan and I decided to attempt the dish, we never looked back and now we often cook it in extra batches for our lunch and dinner the next day!

Again, the ingredients for the sauce are just estimations as I have stopped measuring them after cooking and familiarizing myself with the dish a few times. I usually gauge how much I need for the sauce and taste it to see if I need to add any more flavourings before I add in the starch. However, for this blog-post I’ve measured out the ingredients and you can always tweak the amount of the ingredients to your own personal taste.

Ingredients (Serves 2-3)

Meat and seasoning

400g pork shoulder/butt

2 tablespoon soy sauce

1 tablespoon Chinese cooking wine

2 tablespoon sesame oil

1/2 cup cornstarch

Sauce

100ml water

100ml ketchup/tomato sauce

2 tablespoon oyster sauce

2 tablespoon vinegar

2 tablespoon plum sauce

1-2 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon cornstarch dissolved water

3 cloves garlic minced

1 capsicum chopped into bite size chunks

1 small can of pineapple

Instructions

1. Chop up the pork into bite sized chunks and season them in soy sauce, cooking wine and sesame oil for 30 minutes.

2. Heat up the deep fryer to 170C. You can also shallow fry the pork to reduce the amount of oil used.

3. Drain any remaining seasonings from the pork and coat them with cornstarch.

4. Deep dry the pork for 4-5 minutes and set them aside on kitchen paper.

5. Heat up the wok or frying pan with 2 tablespoon of oil and once it is heated, fry the garlic mince till fragrant.

6. Fry the capsicum chunks for 2 minutes.

7. Add in the water and if you don’t like the crunchiness of the capsicum, you can let it steam for a minute or two.

8. Add in the other sauce ingredients minus the dissolved cornstarch and let it simmer for 2-3 minutes.

9. Turn the heat to low or off and distribute the dissolved cornstarch evenly. Stir quickly till it thickens.

10. Add in the pork to reheat it with the sauce for 1-2 minutes and serve!